Death by Drawing Room: In Jane Austen, Hell is Other People
Entire rooms are made up of ordinary dangers - Jane shows us how to slay them
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Hello dear reader,
Jane Austen novels are full of Sense and Nonsense. The sense is instructive, often tragic, and the nonsense is funny, and often destructive.
So - as we continue this month of horrors that is October, we ask: How do sensible, true humans like, for instance Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor and Marianne, who might meet with more decimating silliness than any other Austen heroes, transcend the treachery? How do they navigate this wilderness of nonsense and what literature professor Maria DeBlassie calls the everyday, ordinary gothic and dangers? And what Professor Cornell West calls the catastrophe in the quotidian? How, indeed, do any of us?
Help us, Aunt Jane!
First, let’s look closely at what characters like Marianne and Elinor are dealing with. It’s not just a few difficult people, such as we might encounter at work, or as a villain in a story. No, in Sense and Sensibility, Austen subjects our dear Elinor and Marianne to the ordeal of navigating entire room-fulls of idiots and downright meanies.
And as we’ll discuss here - the silliness in Austen is not just comical portrayal of manners - the silliness, the bad manners and the drawing-room snobbery and negligence are symptoms of something much more destructive than just bad form.
It arises from actual danger in a world where humans and especially women care often left, as we shall see, to the “cannibals” of male inheritance, as our Tom Paine put it. And women are furthermore discouraged from building the inner resources - through education, through greater understanding, through reason and rationality - that would give them the ammunition they need to fight their way through.
And with this, our stage is set for the disinherited Dashwoods. Or, rather, the disinherited Dashwood women.
Death by Drawing Room
It’s hard to pick just one example of all this drawing-room treachery - throughout the entire novel, the Dashwood women enter a series of drawing rooms where they are the only rational creatures, if you will.
But what the heck, let’s pick one: And let’s make it the one where we meet the “formidable” and much-feared horror, Mrs. Ferrars, the mother of Edward Ferrars and Fanny Dashwood, who is set to block any match for her son unless it is a very noble one.
Austen is funny here. Mrs. Ferrars is, outwardly, as grand as you want. But, our narrator tells us, with a wink, “She was not a woman of many words: for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas …”
So there it is, friends - this lady has not much to say, and she’s not much of a thinker either.
But don’t let the humor distract you from the danger.
We are talking about serious weaponry and serious wounds going down in this dinner party - and we, friends of Elinor’s, always, feel the wounds. Because of the deep interiority of Elinor, through Austen’s “free indirect discourse” and dialogue with us, we are Elinor’s intimate acquaintance. We know that her stillness runs deep.
We wait, and feel, and reason, right along with her.
And it’s not easy to hang out with Elinor here: Beset upon by Mrs. Ferrars, upon whom Elinor might one day depend on for happiness, and also with her rival Lucy Steele - whom Mrs. Ferrars and the Dashwoods are pointedly favoring in order to wound Elinor - not to mention her own brother and sister-in-law who thwart both Elinor’s chances for comfort and shelter and also for love - still Elinor sits, observing, patient and true, and she reflects:
“While she herself, who had comparatively no power to wound them, sat pointedly slighted by both. But while she smiled at a graciousness so misapplied, she could not reflect on the mean-spirited folly from which it sprung … without thoroughly despising all four.”
My dear friends, I feel we have here something special and unique in Austen: Thorough and utter disdain in the drawing room, from an Austen heroine.
Never will Jane Austen again stoop to thoroughly despising a drawing-room full of people at once (or am I missing another instance of complete hatred? If so, please let us know!) This thorough hatred happens in her very first novel, and from there on out Austen instead serves up her disdain with wit and satire.
But I’m not sorry to see it - it’s nice to know, early on, where Austen stands on these things. And she’s telling us, if only we’ll listen to her.
Like Lily James in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies grabbing the nearest letter-opener available to her, I’m ready to slay these monsters for Elinor. Let’s do this.
Sourcing and Slaying the Silliness
What are the monsters up to? What is the source of all the silliness?
One source is inheritance laws. Yes, friends, we might circle around this - round and round and round - but basically Jane Austen’s plot in Sense and Sensibility comes right out of Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist novelist and writer of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Portions of that treatise basically read like the life of the Dashwoods. Because for Wollstonecraft it’s men - our brothers, our cousins, our male neighbors - who inherit the land and the houses and the property of the gentry, and our women are left dependent on them. (For Paine, it’s more specifically eldest brothers - with everyone else left to the cannibals.)
You could say that this precariousness of our lives is at the heart of every one of Austen’s stories.
And as Austen, and Wollstonecraft just before her, is always saying - making women weaker, as Regency society insisted on doing, makes women even more vulnerable.
Wollstonecraft says it in her philosophy, and Austen dramatizes it in her stories - but both are saying the same thing: Make women more educated, more honest, and stronger of character - and they’ll be better able to navigate their world.
This one sentence from Wollstonecraft makes one immediately think first of Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, then of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, check it out: “Girls who have been thus weakly educated, are often cruelly left by their parents without any provision; and, of course, are dependent on, not only the reason, but the bounty of their brothers.” (From Vindication, chapter IV, and reprinted in the Norton Critical edition of Sense and Sensibility, edited by Claudia Johnson).
Not only that - but Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in 1792, when Jane Austen was 17 years old, goes ahead and plots out John Dashwood’s weak, carefully crafted negligence, courtesy of his wife, the silly Fanny: “But,” Wollstonecraft posits, “when the brother marries, a probably circumstance, from being considered the mistress of the family, she is viewed with averted looks as an intruder …”
Wollstonecraft says it in her philosophy, and Austen dramatizes it in her stories - but both are saying the same thing: Make women more educated, more honest, and stronger of character - and they’ll be better able to navigate their world.
This transformation of Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters, Elinor and Marianne, from living in confined comfort on their father’s estate, to being “intruders,” is the opening scene and the through line of Sense and Sensibility. It was the reality and the precariousness of real women’s lives in Regency England, and sometimes also that of the younger brothers like Edward Ferrars - as witnessed by Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and as witnessed, and experienced, by Jane Austen.
And for those of us who need further convincing about this Regency world and its treachery - a treachery that is masked by the tea sets, the costumes and the politeness we see in Regency dramas - just listen to the American Revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine: Yes, that Thomas Paine - the one of Common Sense - in Rights of Man, in 1791, Paine described the world of inheritance among the gentry and the havoc it could wreck on families, saying, “Aristocracy has never more than one child. The rest are begotten to be devoured. They are thrown to the cannibal for prey …”
This world of prey and cannibals is recreated by Austen, who, remember, not only is the author and creator of Elinor and Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood, but is also the author of the late Mr. Dashwood, who knows this world well, and who urges from his deathbed that his son, John Dashwood, provide for his wife and daughters, seeing before him the potential for devouring.
People-people. Not.
But, friends, we are not scholars, we are not world leaders, we are not cannibals, most of us.
We are simply readers and citizens trying to make our way in the world. And thus we actively ask the question: How do Austen’s heroes do it? How did Austen herself do it? How did she navigate a world of cruelty, neglect, displacement - and build her inner resources and strength and turn all this somehow into fulfillment and affection, if not outright happiness? (And sometimes maybe even happiness!)
How indeed, is the subject of Austen’s stories.
What ammunition, what resources, what Lily-James-letter-openers do you find in Austen that help you deal with difficult family members, with disappointments, with slights toward your reason, your skills, on the basis of your race, your gender, your station, ability, or anything else that makes you you?
We’ll explore this more in future discussions, but two things Austen’s heroines are armed with: Fortitude, and Solitude. They endure, they’re patient - and they enjoy their own company, having stockpiled their inner resources.
Austen is giving us the power to slay here, friends - urging us, when surrounded by idiocy and treachery to: Educate yourself, make yourself the judge, and condemn them all.
And, also: Be kind to yourself and giving yourself a good talking-to about how awesome you are, that’s all you need. Your own inner resources.
And it’s not just Austen’s heroines who rely on their inner resources. It’s also the leading men, many of whom powerfully exhibit all the outer resources the Regency system of aristocracy and nobility can bestow - yet they maintain their own inner reserves of reason, sense, and integrity, and disdain the silliness that surrounds them.
This is what’s going on with Darcy - for whom hell is most notably other people. And also with Knightley, in fact both Knightley brothers, who keep their company very limited, but bestow a deep loyalty on those they do care for.
In contrast, the Willoughbys, the Wickhams and the Frank Churchills? You got it - they’re people-people.
And Austen despises them for it.
With all this, Jane Austen shows us the brutality, the precariousness - you can even call it cannibalism if it was good enough for Tom Paine - of the world our heroines navigate, and they do so with reason, but also with feeling. With honesty, integrity, and grit.
So why is it that we often don’t celebrate the rationality in these stories? We instead celebrate the romance, the love that provides the climax, along with a safe home, whether it’s Pemberley or a parsonage, to live out our days in. And that’s OK. Maybe it’s even intentional.
Because in this way, Austen - while aiming all the time for our heads - manages to capture our hearts.
Austen - while aiming all the time for our heads - manages to capture our hearts.
But what do you think, friends? Again, please let me know what you take from Jane when it comes to navigating this dangerous world of October horrors. How do you maintain your honesty, your loyalty, to yourself and others, your integrity, and your calm, in the midst of endless slights and wounds, dangers and oppressions that beset us today, as real as any Regency inheritance law?
Let me know how you do it - and what you take from our Austen heroines (and heroes). Comment here!
Next week, our conversation about everyday magic, ordinary gothic, and Northanger Abbey, for the Austen Connection Halloween edition, with Professor Maria DeBlassie. See you next week - and meanwhile connect with us on Twitter at @AustenConnect, and on Insta and Facebook at @austenconnection.
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Stay in touch, have a wonderful autumn week and weekend, and slay any October horrors with your own inner resources, and with perhaps a spicy latte.
With Elinor-style heart, fortitude, and affection, yours truly,
Plain Jane
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